What is IMCom

IMCom is a command-line Jabber client written in Python.
Its original goal was to replace mICQ as my instant messenger. To that end it looks very similar to mICQ, though the actual command interpreter is a bit different. Commands are issued to IMCom in a style similar to IRC.

What does IMCom support?

IMCom supports the following Jabber technologies:

Sending/Receiving Messages
Presence Updates
File Transfer
SSL Connections
vCard retrieval and submission
Basic Support of the jabber:iq:admin namespace
Agent and Transport Registration
Handles Jabber Resources properly
Jabber Conferences

IMCom supports the following UI stuffs

Command customization
Multi-line messages
Sending a message to a particular resource a user is logged in from
ignore and lurker group support
Auto-Status
Reply/Again (sending a message to the last person to message you and sending a message to the last person you messaged
Color customization (Note that it doesn't work by default with a white background black text shell. You HAVE to customize the colors in that case.)
Multiple profile support

What does IMCom require?

IMCom first and foremost requires a python interpreter which can be obtained at www.python.org. I have tested with Python 2.0 and 2.1. It may work with python 1.x and it may work with Python 2.2, I don't know though. Also, this has only been tested on the linux C Python versions 2.0,2.1. If someone is willing to test on other platforms/version please contact me.

IMCom requires the pyexpat or expat module for python. Note that while the windows binary distribution of python includes the expat parser the linux source by default doesn't build in support for expat. You have to edit the Setup file in the Modules subdirectory of the source tree and specify where the expat library and includes are kept. For more information about building python with expat support read the python README and the Modules/Setup.in file from the python source tree.

The expat library itself can be found here:

It is highly recommended, but not required, to have the readline module for python installed as well. Readline needs to be explicitly compiled in under unix. Windows does not ship with readline, but supposedly there is a working implementation here: http://newcenturycomputers.net/projects/readline.html

If you're lazy you can go to ActiveState and get ActivePython which includes everything you need.

Where can I get IMCom?

http://imcom.floobin.cx Documentation
http://discobob.dyndns.org/~crabbkw/imcom.html Nightly source and binary builds for linux.
http://imcom.floobin.cxSource tar balls for official versions.
http://discobob.dyndns.org/~crabbkw/imcom/ Bleeding Edge Source

Who Maintains IMCom

Casey Crabb (crabbkw@rose-hulman.edu) maintains IMCom and enthusiastically accepts bug reports, especially if they are reproducible. Feature requests are also taken into consideration and potentially added to the list of things to do.